Frontal cortex emesis between novels.

Monthly Archives: December 2009

This was the best effin’ Christmas ever, people, hands down. This is even better than the time I got the bike that I did not for one second think belonged to me. My Mum loves to tell that story. I apparently walked into my parents’ bedroom (as it did not fit under the tree) and remarked, “There’s a bike in here.” It had a big red bow, & my mother said it came from Father Christmas, but I was incredulous.

No matter. Many bike riding years later (and now I like to take ’em through the dirt, mothersuckas!) I had the best Christmas ever with my Mum, sister, & brother. I have to tell you about it, as it was that epic. I am also going to come out of a couple of closets for the first time. And no, nothing that exciting, guys. In fact 80% of you will be sorely disappointed & probably direct me back into my closet. But screw it. I’m happy about stuffs & I might as well tell yall.

But everything in order! I LIKE ORDER.

First, my sister Caroline (cathespian04 if you’d like to follow her on Twitter) picked me up from the Ontario airport & drove me to Rancho Cucamonga. We had a discussion that I am fairly sure involved death, as she was wont to remark, “That’s what I love about you, Kellie. Your upbeat, lively conversation.” Of course there was cackling.

We arrived to the mingled scents of turkey and roast beef. My Mum gave me a big hug & informed me I was making Cuban sweet potatoes again (who knew?) and that this time, Trader Joe’s did not screw us on the cilantro. Don’t ask that to make sense. We watched a bit of Return of the King and then my mother brought me a pot of sweet potatoes to peel. Well, I supposed it was time to roll up my green sleeves and work. Caroline & I chatted while I peeled with the world’s worst knife, but no matter. We opened presents (two Thomas Sowell books from my sister, Elizabeth Hasselbeck’s gluten free book, make up, gift certificates, and some lovely jewellery from my Mum…and they opened the Benefit goodies I got them).

By the time the food was done, it was glorious. I sent some photos to Twitpics, as many of you saw, of the gluten free happiness (including a honkin’ huge slab of roast beef) upon my plate. My brother Mitch came out of his man cave long enough to help us nom on English roast potatoes (about as close to heaven as food gets). They gobbled up my sweet potatoes again (only ask me to make it for you if you love garlic more than conversing with other people), & my Mum had secured a flourless chocolate cake & gluten free ice cream for dessert. There were also fresh raspberries. It was a delight. I was able to play all the Christmas music from my iPhone while we ate, which was fun since I hadn’t really had a chance to listen to it before. I let Mitchy know I had put some gifts under the tree for him and he took off. He loved his Superman t-shirt & his Oscar The Grouch puppet. Then he went back to his man cave.

The girls then decided to play Beatles Trivial Pursuit. There are some things you need to know about my family to understand the rest of the evening. One: my mother is, hands down, the world’s biggest Beatles fan PRE-White Album. Pre. Very important to note. Two: my mother was a teenager in London during the 1960s, and worked in a record shop. She knows every original English Beatles release. Three: my mother has been sober for over a decade, so my sister & I had to polish off the bottle of sparkling chardonnay, just the two of us. Four: I can’t drink like I did in college. Five: my sister is a grad student & 11 years younger than me. Technically, she shouldn’t know anything about the Beatles aside from what Mum & I have conveyed to her. Subsequently, we kind of let her cheat by asking her the easiest questions on the cards.

HAH.

Here’s how this nonsense went down. For those of you who were playing along on Twitter with me, here’s the answer key for OverHeard:

“If you wanna throw some nuts in your mouth, feel free.” That was from my mother, who insists Caroline & I have the dirty minds since we couldn’t stop laughing for 20 minutes and my insisting on tweeting it. However, her propensity to keep bringing it back up leaves me dubious. Who talks to their daughters that way? Well, I probably would.

“Does that say Bejesus Trivial Pursuit? Oh, BEATLES.” That was me. Yep, wine had been drunk in copious amounts. But look at the question cards from afar, with dry contacts in your eyes. IT SAYS BE-FREAKIN’-JESUS.

“Oh, Americans are so crap!” That was my mother. Why? Because Beatles Trivial Pursuit was written by Americans, who apparently got a Christmas album that was never released in the UK, in addition to several weird blue vinyl compilation albums that were the answer to several questions. All of a sudden, the woman who was professing to beat us all down with her superior Beatles knowledge was sucking just as hard as the rest of us. And this is the same woman who, when asked “What blunt instrument did Maxwell use to bludgeon people over the head in ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’?” actually said, “Ooh, I dunno, a shovel?” She claims to not have heard the question correctly. My sister & I made eyebrows at each other.

“When I’m in my time of trouble, Motherfucker comes to me speaking words of wisdom. Let it be.” No, that WASN’T me though I have been singing it ever since. That was my MOTHER. The same woman who yelled at me for using that exact same term repeatedly. How did that happen? The question was “What name did Paul sometimes substitute instead of Mary?” I shit you not. My mother came up with “fucker”. Mother Mary, forgive us. *blinks repeatedly*

This OH I have to script:Caroline: “It’s like a shape.”Me: “The Palindromes!”Caroline: “That’s not a shape.”Me: “Yes it is!”Caroline: “Seriously?!”Me: “Oh wait. I meant Parallelogram.”Caroline: “Well, none of that crap is right.”

I don’t even remember what the question was.

My mother kept singing “Band on the Run” at random times, and then she insisted that rather than hum tunes, we go “da da da” because Beatles songs go “da da da” and not “mmm mmm mmm”. Yah. And Caroline & I kept singing “Octopus’ Garden” to the tune of Oasis’ “Champagne Supernova”. Also we had to practically sing “Back in the U.S.S.R.” to my sister to get her to answer “What Beatles song has a former nation in the title?”

DESPITE this, she won! I got all my pie pieces first, then my mum, and then my mum said that Caroline professes to not know things but that “that slut always ends up winning.” My sister then refused to give my mother any more hints as she called her a slut, which I agreed was very traumatic for a child to hear from a parent, & my mother said she didn’t mean it like that, which was nice of her.

Caroline got her pie pieces LAST, and got her very first middle of the circle question RIGHT. Seriously. Eff me!

At some point the next day Caroline and I engaged in a number of political discussions mostly spurred by me checking my iPhone & going, “Oh, Adam Baldwin’s getting into it with some other octotard!” and my sister asking what Adam said on Twitter. I would repeat it and we’d talk about it. We discussed education, how everybody sucks now because American education is starting to cater to the lowest common denominator, and somehow this led to the assertion that agriculture is responsible for whininess, the logical conclusion of which is Communism.

No, stay with me here.

Back in the day, you hunted & gathered or you starved & died. Then we figured out we could plant wheat (horrible, horrible gluten WHICH, you might note, makes one out of eighty of people wobbly in the head, including me), and we decided to sit around planting heinous, heinous wheat. Once we started sitting around planting wheat & not having to go anywhere to get food, a subsection of the population, who would normally die on the tundra by age 17, were now sitting around wondering when would come the glorious days when they could stand in line for bread & toilet paper. Hence, agriculture leads to Communism.

Little agrarian collectivist yuck farms!

Look, it makes perfect sense when you go through the whole hour long explanation.

Anyhow, eventually my mother sat down with us and we talked about Jesus. *big breath* I have returned to Christianity. This was coming for a while, but several things have happened recently and bam, here I am, the two Big Cs again…conservative and CHRISTIAN. Yes. This won’t be even remotely a shock to some of you, as you have accused me of being morally Christian for some time. This will be a big flaming shock and disappointment to some of you, who entertain the idea that I am this big fun loving whore who sacrifices puppies to Kali. Not so much. I like fun, but no matter how many times I tweet that I will kick a puppy, I’ve never sacrificed one to Kali. I’ve never even kicked a puppy. I stepped on my mum’s dog’s ear by accident, and also dropped a 400 degree pan on his head, but that’s it.

My mum is apparently also a big Christian! We talked about Jesus for a while. I told her about my talks with Consigliere5, whom you should follow on Twitter, and one day I will post my emails to him here on this blog, as it’s funny seeing my thought process on returning to Christ. He was very patient and sweet with me. But anyhow, my mum credits God with getting her sober & keeping her there. I do, too, but I also think my mum has a little something to do with it.

Jesus spent a big fat while getting me back, much as one looks for a stupid cat in the snow. Again, there’s a lot of stuff between “I’m an atheist!” at 14 to “Er, I’m a Christian again” at 35, and it’s very much like looking for a stupid cat in the snow. A cat who thought climbing into an old pile of tires and then an engine block would be a good idea rather than go back to the house, but again, this IS a stupid cat we are talking about here, and of course by “stupid cat” I mean me.

My sister then told us that she figures she’s Christian, but there’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t make sense and also the crushing guilt. I told her I totally empathized, that I couldn’t reconcile the crushing guilt of being human with Christianity & it’s probably why I went the circuitous route through Wicca & then Buddhism to get BACK to Jesus, but C5 showed me some passages in John we weren’t exposed to in Christian school, oddly enough. I talked about God’s grace, & Jesus’ responsibility to keep us, and how it didn’t give us a license to be dicks, but it did take into account the fact that we’re just people.

I explained it thusly. Feel free to use this. “Jesus is like a crazy cat lady. Yes, the cats climb the curtains, they pee on stuff, they knock a bag of Doritos on the floor. The cats are little jerks. But Jesus loves cats, and in fact keeps getting more despite what little assholes they are. So if you think of Jesus like a crazy cat lady, you realize He loves you anyway no matter what mischief you get into. He’d rather you were a good cat, and he will give you treats if you’re a good cat. Cats who eat Doritos don’t get treats. But He still loves the cat who eats the Doritos, even though that cat sucks. He just loves Him some cats.”

I really hope this is not blasphemy, but it’s the best way to explain Grace to myself. And my sister, apparently.

We also agreed that most church is too early in the morning.

Some of you have been suspicious of my mysterious happiness lately. Don’t be suspicious any more. I’m happy because I finally know what I’m doing, I know why I’m alive and I know why things are happening the way they are happening. God really does work in mysterious ways, and I’ve stopped questioning it. He knows what He wants from me. He knows I can give it. I used to think I could use the elements of the universe to do my bidding. Now I realize all along that I was supposed to be used, and not in the way I was allowing myself to be used. When Jesus uses you, it’s not like, you know, frat guys.

It’s more like being a Desert Eagle. Jesus is going to use me to blow giant happy holes in your heads. You’ll see. But, like, in a good way.

Ok ok…the gun analogy is not going to work, I see. Ah yes, Crazy Cat Lady. Jesus is going to take You Tube videos of His little cats. I’m the one that rides the Roomba & goes “Surprise!” He’s going to use me to make you happy. No, it won’t be with porn, like some have suggested. Well, who knows? But somehow I don’t think it’s porn.

Surprise!

Another fun thing…on the way to dinner Saturday night, we were all in the car, myself, Mum, Caroline, & my brother Mitchy. “Ave Maria” came on & we all sang. You have to keep in mind, my mum & sis & I have beautiful singing voices and do three part harmony spontaneously. It’s lovely. My brother…has Down syndrome. And is his father’s son. However, the Von Crap family, as my mother described us, sounded glorious, the girls in three part harmony & my brother sounding like an incredibly happy barge.

So the Twitterverse knows that a little while ago I had to complete a 120+ page project in a week. Additionally I kept getting emails & phone calls via the underwriter for weeks after, all of them stupid questions a brain dead squashed monkey would be ashamed to ask. This thing has set me behind quite a bit, and since the loss of my glorious assistant, I am on the verge of a psychotic break as it is.

The project was malpractice insurance applications for all my surgeons, plus the entity. We were promised a $10k reduction in premiums. I was assured this would not be a waste of my precious, sanity clenching time. Today they came back with a quote not only without the discount, but also another $50k higher. We opted, naturally, to stick with our old carrier.

I was told this by my surgeon friend because he thought it would give me a good laugh. Here is what actually happened. I believe I endured an aneurysm. I got a shooting pain up my left leg, which may or may not be a sign of heart attack, dysentery, and stroke combined. Maybe even sarcoidosis. I then immediately had the urge to grab a machete & run through the office, challenging anyone with the cajones to a duel. I was then going to fly to Iowa and possibly blow up the company building with my mind.

I told he surgeon this. He thought I was kidding. See, I’m so cute when I’m angry.

My docs have no pending suits, so what’s up with the shite quote? I have two words for you that I like, and then many that I don’t.

First: tort reform. It’s effing awesome.

Second: Bernie Anderson, the demmycrat from my bleedin’ district, introduced a bill to the Nevada assembly last year that sought to emasculate our precious tort reform by adding in damages for “gross negligence”. That, folks, can mean anything.

So because a digestive health center or two decided not to clean their instruments one day, every doctor in Nevada gets punished with soaring premiums? Really, Nevada? Oh wait, the same sort of nonsense reasoning is what made the Nevada medical board become what I affectionately term The Absurd Reich.

I don’t have time on my lunch to explain any of that. Thankfully, the Nevada senate let that assembly bill die. However, we’re facing an election and all that happy horseshit could come back to play another day. SO, insurance companies are preparing. More defensive medicine, here we come! If we had accepted that quote, we might have had to cut two jobs. So way to stand up for the working class, ya bastards.

I know this; you know this. It’s not news, or a secret, or even probably of remote interest to most folks. The problem is, the more normal I try to get, the weirder people seem to think I am.

This brings me to the subject at hand: deviancy. Inspired by today’s compelled readings (ok so fine, my arm remains untwisted), eager to shoot back at them and then of course to also concede some points on further thought, I realized that my whole life has been about fighting deviancy. Not just in college, but since, kind of, birth.

I don’t mean overblown neodeviancy where we’ve decided that anybody who thinks anything outside of the accepted 18 – 45 Year Old Demo Think is the corporate devil. I mean actual deviancy, actual devil.

This could get kinda heavy, but it also will be as funny as I can possibly make rape, abuse, & politics be. Er. Yeah.

When I was in college, I studied psychology with the intent to treat persons who were adult survivors of sexual assault. I mostly wanted to deal with persons suffering from PTSD or borderline personality disorder who were abused as children. This brings me to the following link http://www.aei.org/speech/17965 which in part asserts that survivor memories are actually suggested by psychologists. Well, unfortunately that is sometimes true, but not always.

But sometimes, yes.

“My God!” you are all screaming at me. “How can you say such a thing? First of all, this horrible article decries the concept of date rape & then it also says that people who spontaneously remember abuse are full of crap!” Well, it doesn’t actually say either of those things, so simmer down.

Let me share with you a wacky experience, both academic and personal.

My senior year, I was part of a research team headed by an amazing man who had a master’s degree in epistemology and a doctorate in psychology. He specifically helped people prosecute sexual assault. He had an incredibly dark sense of nonchalant humour, as one must in that line of business. And the team working under him were ok…

Here’s the thing. We were trying to develop a way to teach college age males that coerced sex is wrong. We were researching what methods worked. Getting them to feel empathy for the victim did not. Giving them facts about the physical costs of rape did not. Getting them to understand what would happen to their lives if they got caught seemed most effective, in our research.

The graduate students in the team were also working on an unbiased sexual abuse assessment for child molestation cases. As I’m sure some of you know, there have been horrific miscarriages of justice that, instead of protecting children, traumatize them further, and these are perpetrated by social workers & psychologists. One of the films I watched during my time with this group showed a social worker asking a child repeatedly “Did he touch you there?” Something like 37 times, no joke. The child kept saying no, but eventually said, exasperated, “If I say yes, will you stop asking me that question?” The social worker triumphantly wrote that down in her notes as positive identification of molestation!

The unbiased sexual assessment tool was supposed to ask questions in a way that was not repetitious, leading, or traumatizing. I thought it was a great project, and I respected the guys who were putting it together.

However, one of them did something to me I will never forget & barely understood until today, when I read the link.

I had been relaying to him my weekend. To me, it seemed pretty typical KJ fare. See, in college, and here’s where some of *my* deviance shows, I would choose sexual partners sometimes based on how great of a story it would make later, and by “great” I mean “funny”. I would get myself, however, into really stupid situations, mostly because I was hammered, had a best friend who was emotionally crippled & also hammered, and God protected my idiot arse for some reason during all of this. Technically, I should be dead in the desert somewhere, or in a Russian brothel.

The weekend went as follows: I got very, very inebriated. I met up with a friend and his friends. We thought it would be a great idea to go drink some more, so I got in a Jeep with a bunch of strange men 8 times my size & we drove out to some hick bar, had 4 more pitchers of beer, & I shot some of the best pool in my life (I have to admit, I’m kind of a shark). We then drove around some more. By the time we reached his place, I had no idea where I was. He said I could stay as nobody was sober enough at this point to drive me home, wherever that was, and I stayed with him. You can guess what happened next. When I woke up the next morning, I had a lovely chat with the boys in the house, watched my sexual partner beat the crap out of his room mate with a hockey stick (all in good fun), and then realized, “Oh. I am one block from my dorm.” I thought I had told the boys where I lived, but I guess not? They wanted me to go to lunch with them, but I had to get back to study or something, so I walked home.

So anyhow, I relayed this to my grad student friend in the same tone I relay all such stories, which is the tone whereby I stop every ten seconds because I am laughing too hard. When I was done, I noticed that he had a horrified look on his face. It then melted into what I took to be compassionate lines of concern.

Say WHAT?! I must have cocked my head to the side. That’s what I do. I also make a kind of twisty face.

He got down to my level (he was sitting on the table, I was in a chair) & looked me in the eye (to his credit, he didn’t touch me). “You’ve been researching & assisting this group all this time & you don’t even realize you’ve been raped? Oh, Kellie Jane.”

In retrospect, I see this as intellectual condescension.

He explained to me that I had been coerced with alcohol and the disorientation of being driven around. Was I sure the other boys hadn’t enjoyed me? Yes, I was quite certain, considering one of them was a relatively famous boxer & I think I would have felt the after effects of someone that large. Also the discussion I had with one of the other guys in the house in the morning seemed pretty indicative of him not getting a shot at me. I was not so drunk I couldn’t remember being gang raped.

I had only had sex with the one goofy frat guy. Of that I was certain.

Oh, but he had date raped me for sure, the grad student explained. By keeping me awake (I did admit that I finally had sex with the guy because he was whining so much I couldn’t sleep), he was further disorienting and coercing me. Did he at least use a condom? My GOD, yes. I don’t let anybody near me without!

The graduate student tut tutted. “That in an of itself does not prevent it from being date rape.” I said that was true; rapists use condoms to prevent evidence from, er, escaping on to/into the victim. “But I wasn’t raped,” I repeated.

Oh, but I WAS. He actually argued with me!

No, I wasn’t. See, I had a point of comparison. I had previously actually been sexually assaulted, and that was an entirely different experience. That had nothing to do with choices I had made, with accepting a certain amount of personal responsibility for my reckless behaviour, because when I was really sexually assaulted, I was a child. I explained this to him.

Even more pity showed up on his face. “Oh of course you don’t know what non-coercive sex is like, you poor thing! You’ve been programmed to accept that you are simply a vessel to be acted upon!”

Oh BROTHER.

Well, he has a point. Despite my rather, er, dominant personality, I am actually a relatively submissive mate. I won’t get into that too much. Suffice to say, despite having been a Passion Parties rep & someone who has taken several sexuality classes due to my college studies, I am pretty vanilla. There, I said it. I like being the girl. I’m a passionate vanilla, you know, the kind you scrape out of the pod, but vanilla nonetheless.

It wasn’t always that way, though. In response to my real rape, I was the way flexible, highly skilled aggressor for quite some time. I was also very callous. I assumed it meant as little to them as it did to me. I was surprised and horrified by the hurt feelings of men who felt I didn’t care about them enough. I was in fact quite disgusted by such mewling squishy boys. Sex was a game. You took what you could & bragged about it later.

Did I enjoy any of that? Good lord, no! None of that sex was even remotely satisfying. It was, however, very empowering. I felt profoundly in control, despite clearly being out of control. This is typical sex assault survivor behaviour, by the way (some of you are saying “Duh”). You either go virginal (which I did at first), or swing the other way.

Being virginal was not empowering. For a while, in high school, it was gratifying to always be right. Yes, that’s how much of an ass I was about my virginity. I was always right; everyone else was disgusting. Well, being a virgin wasn’t giving me any power at all. I was a shapely girl with an impish little face, and withholding all that from the male masses seemed to only make them annoyed with me. I guess that, plus alcohol and my incredibly messed up older friend, gave me permission to be a relatively bad girl in college.

I could tell you stories. Most of them are funny.

But here’s what’s not funny. After this discussion, I started backing away from the research group. See, it was to be my job to go to the frat houses to recruit the boys to come in for the study. I was also to approach the various sport teams. I started to get nervous about this, and by the time I was to actually do it, I was so paralyzed with fear I stopped showing up to meetings. The grad student who helped me “see the light” gladly took over that arduous task for me, since he “understood“.

I started having panic attacks. I ended up having to take Norvasc to calm me down.

That son of a bitch.

In retrospect, this was idiotic. However, because the comparison had been drawn between my actual sexual assault and this supposed date rape, I had a flood of flashbacky unhappiness. The rest of that semester was hell. I had no flashbacks at all of my alleged date rape, but I had plenty of the actual. I have, to this day, not even the weirdest of feelings about the “date rape”.

This grad student took my power away from me. He defined the deviancy of my experience UP. I had taken responsibility for my silly actions, and I was fine with that. He tried to make me into a victim.

Well, as I’ve said since I was 13, I’m a survivor, not a victim. Victims are in the ground.

The grad student also, in a way, defined the deviancy of my real assault DOWN. Mine was a typical middle class story. I was a classic victim. I was statistically normal. Really? It’s ok, what happened to me, because it happens to so many little girls? No, of course it’s not ok, but it’s not as special as I think.
I was actually given a book by one therapist, and it’s pretty good except that it really insists that everything that is wrong with you stems from your childhood sexual assault experiences. Every personality flaw can be explained away by your survivor trauma. It also makes a point of telling us that we are not special. It actually says that feeling special is bad. I can kind of see the point; a lot of us feel “marked”, like we deserve sexual assault, like we were born to be used. The book defines this as “specialness”, and how we are not special because fully one half of all women are sexually assaulted as children.

Bears repeating.

Fully one half of all women, according this book, are sexually assaulted as children.

Really? Because the extremely few people on the planet who know fully what has happened to me are always horrified and shocked. They don’t nod & say “Oh, yes, when that happened to me, I…” No. None of that. One half?

The author of the book bases her “fact” on the idea that so much sexual assault of children goes unreported. Well, that’s true, but one half? With no actual data to back that up, that’s a hell of a statement to make.

I feel I have a pretty goddamned special perspective on life, and particularly on sex. I know I believe things & accept things other women most certainly do not. In fact, I have a hard time making friends with women because of my views about sexuality. This is changing, but the fact is, I am not entirely typical.

I see my new found submissiveness as a step in the right direction, because you can bet your sweet ass I am not going to get involved with anyone who is going to hurt me. I don’t crave sex anywhere near as much as affection, which is pretty hard for a bad ass like me to admit. And now we come to the other reason I am apparently deviant…

I’m becoming moral. Yep. No kidding.

I’ve always been kind of moral. I remember with horror the day that two doctors, both female, both pregnant, said I should have a baby too. To their credit, I was already in my 30s. “I’m not married,” I pointed out. To me, that was the only logical response. Both of them said, “Oh please, that’s not necessary any more. Every woman is capable of raising a child by herself. Men are superfluous.”

I sorta coughed. “I know I can’t raise a child by myself. I will not have one until I am married.”

Another doctor, male, happened to walk into the room at the same time & he said to me, “Well, your way is the way you’re supposed to do it, kid.” The other two doctors glared at him. I smiled.

I want to be married. I do. Eventually. I also have, shockingly, no trouble being a trophy wife, which means I have to be in better shape. This horrifies most of my female friends & of course my enlightened male friends. They assume wives are powerless pawns of a dominant male. I assert that wives and mothers are the rulers of households, the most dominant influence in a child’s life, and hence the primary engine of the future.

I technically should NOT have this view considering my childhood, but I see in normal, stable households that this is the case more often than not. People who come from such homes seem pretty darned well adjusted and pleasant to me. I can haz well adjusted??

Single moms do the best they can, and in situations where the husband is degrading everyone, abusing mom and kids, it’s certainly better to get the hell out. However, by definition they are doing it alone and cannot be the most dominant influence in a child’s life. They aren’t there. Mom or dad, nobody is home for most of the day. And even if mom & dad both work, if it’s just mom, it’s twice as hard to get a parent home if the kid needs it.

I used to pine after tortured musiciany boys in high school. No more. Now I yearn for stability. I guess I’m aging. I guess I am sick of wasting my time with men who expect me to do fricken’ everything. I want to be able to trust someone to not hurt me, to not screw up my house, to not hurt any children in our lives. I want to be adored for being good and kind and amusing and helpful. That’s what I’m best at. Well.

No, this isn’t new or right wing of me. I was like this as a kid (well, I was extremely right wing as kid, too, so you have a point). When I was 7, I announced to my family in the car on the way to Disneyworld that when I was 16, I was going to marry a prince. My father laughed & said the only way I was getting married at 16 was to a rich Texan. I was furious. I was going to be a princess, dammit. Oh yes, since I was 3 I had wanted to act & sing & dance and, when I was 5, I added writing to that list. But I was also perfectly willing to give it up, just like Princess Grace, to be, well, somebody’s princess.

Today, we call this a “trophy wife”. Have you noticed that most chicks on trophies have tiaras? Let’s call it what it really is. Princess. And if Disney has taught us anything, princesses sing and cook, plus they keep a tidy household. They also have fabulous wardrobes. It’s only fair with all the work they do.

I’m sick of cynically hating the whole Prince Charming concept. So what? Some guys actually don’t suck. Don’t you deserve to hold out for a non-sucky guy? Why settle for some condescending intellectual nitwit who wants to empower you by arguing with you daily about who does more housework? (Hint: it’s ALWAYS you, ladies. There is no such thing as an equal house. Nobody is programmed for that). Why settle for some enlightened equality-spouting thinky guy who insists you learn weirder and more, frankly, degrading sexual tricks to gain his intellectual interest while he‘s so busy thinking away? Because clearly, you aren’t interesting enough, all things being “equal”. Please note that he learns *nothing* & wants to turn over all the work to you, & possibly also an open minded girlfriend.

I suppose these days, these ideas make me a freak. Oh well. I’m a freak. You can call me Your Freakish Highness.

Here’s *a* photo. There could be more, but it was all a blur. It was kinda badda boom badda bing this year. And by “it” I mean the office Christmas party. And nobody did the worm or pole danced, so I am sad. Also I am still at work; everyone else is gone. Murderus rage welling up as I type. Yup.

I am happy. I am happier than I have been in years, and I am even happier to tell you all why.

It’s not going to be overly easy to explain. Some of you in fact are going to be downright dismayed by the whole thing. Actually, judging from some of your recent blog entries & exasperated tweets, you are already dismayed. This is understandable, as you’ve yet to ask me anything directly, goobers. The question you want to ask is, “KJ. WTF?”

I’m becoming ME again.

I hear mixed reviews. Some of you didn’t like Me. You prefered the sick, easily emotionally swayed weak & miserable KJ who kinda just went along with everything, had a lot of existential angst, & was relatively certain to be fat her entire life. She believed things because they sounded and “felt” right, because they seemed like the nicest thing on the surface. She was constantly tired and achy, moderately suicidal, but good at keeping a stiff upper lip. She put up with stuff because she didn’t have the energy to do otherwise. She was snarky & angry & didn’t understand why people didn’t just GET IT.

Wait…ok…that last sentence? That kind of hasn’t changed. That’s a core personality trait that unfortunately cannot be beaten from me, and God knows people have tried.

Some of you really adored Me. You have known Me a really long time. You remember when I was Going Places, Doing Things, Seeing People. You knew Me when I had dreams, before I got sick, before I was getting sick, when I still thought TV was a tool of Satan, when I was not just pro-life for me but Pro-Life-Period, full of conviction, loaded with boundless energy. Or you might not have known me quite that far back, but you knew me when some of that was still hovering under all the “Wait! Ack! What happened?!” of my life. I’m fairly certain none of you knew me when I was Christian. Well, maybe two of you.

Somewhere along the way, I became convinced that I was doing everything wrong, even though it had been working very well for me up to that point, and I pretty much did a 180. I know I was seeking something. I had become disallusioned somewhere, and I am pretty sure it was a reaction. It was an irrational, emotional reaction to a seething, deserved hatred of somebody who had hurt me deeply and claimed to represent everything I believed in, everything that had otherwise loved & comforted me. How could I love all that if this person was all that? I am pretty sure now, in hindsight, that I rejected all of that because I associated it with that person.

He was anything BUT all those things. He was evil manifest, disguised as tradition and scripture.

Lately some folks have come into my life (you know who you are) who have reminded me to think before reacting, to consider before responding, to read before writing. Not absorb TV, not suck down seemingly compassionate platitudes, but to think about what we believe, to understand where it comes from, to look for facts. It sounds like these people are pretty cold & maybe sorta mean, huh? But they’re not. They’re the warmest, most accepting and friendsome group of folks a girl could have the pleasure of knowing. They have the patience of saints, & are kind enough to not call me an idiot anywhere near as much as I deserve.

No, I’ve not joined a cult. Now you’re just being snarky. One of them is actually a lady I’ve butted heads with at work & some are tweeps & some are Browncoats. 2009 will go down in history as the Year of Teh Awesome Peoples.

My point is, my brain is starting to work again so I can even consider the idea of thinking-not-reacting. It’s receiving nutrients & making neurochemicals all on its lonesome. Do you know something amazing? I’ve stopped taking Lyrica. That bears repeating and emphasis. I HAVE STOPPED TAKING LYRICA. This is something unimagined before, because after only 4 days off I would become a twisted wreck of pain again. How is this possible?

I am going to a cash pay only doctor. He spends hours with me, because he doesn’t have to take insurance discounts & he doesn’t take any government funded plans. He can actually afford to charge a reasonable rate & spend time with me. He figured out that I have celiac disease and am to a degree lactose & soy intolerant. Changing my diet alone took me off the only medication the FDA had approved for my “condition”, which was diagnosed by a harried neurologist accepting traditional medical reimbursement.

I also no longer take muscle relaxants, and soon I will go off my migraine medication! This. Is. HUGE.

Lyrica not only causes fuzziness but it also made me hallucinate just a tad. I feel like the whole past 3 years was a hallucination. I feel like nothing I’ve done, thought or said in the past three years made a lick of sense. I could easily stretch that back another 10 years, which is when my doctor feels I probably started to get sick, as my symptom clusters started popping up then. So Christ…who AM I now?

I am not entirely sure, and I admit I am slightly uneasy as I don’t remember what it’s like to be this…I dunno. Hopeful? But I think I’m Me now. I think I’m who I was at 9. I am whatever I was supposed to be before It All Went To Hell. Not that it wasn’t going to hell before, but I began to recognize that it was going to hell around 9 years old. Nine is when I last felt certain of anything in the world. How sad is that?

Jesus said something about coming to him as a little child, and some of you might remark sneeringly that this is so you can be a malleable, programmable stick puppet. Well, that’s your right to think. It’s true that it’s a lot easier to indoctrinate kids than it is snarky teens or know-it-all college students (I’m picking on them because I had to sit behind an exasperating soul patch for 2 hours on a plane Sunday & I’m over grad students & the sound of their own voices). But think about it. When you were 9, you might have still believed in Santa, & you probably felt pretty damned good about that. Well, when I was 9, I believed in a lot of things and they made me happy. I loved Wednesdays because that was chapel day, and I loved being outside, and I loved to fly because I felt safe, and I thought people were inherently good, and I didn’t understand why anybody would ever want to kill themselves.

The next year, I was in therapy because I wanted to kill myself.

So.

Full disclosure: I am in near tears writing this. Part of it is gratitude, part of it is confusion, part of it is that I wish I had sent this as a private email to a friend before posting it as a blog. Part of me says, F you all, you get to ride my weird boomerang back to the 80s with me: Reagan, Jesus, loafers, Coke with real sugar in it, making confidence courses in the back yard, Voltron, She-Ra, A-Team, Billy F’n Ocean!

Part of me is also terrified that my newer friends will stop liking me while I reshift. I mean, really, it’s the same obnoxious me, just not agreeing with you as much. Not that some of you ever agreed with me no matter what I said, and you must love me anyway because you clearly think I am a dipshit. But I have to tell you all something. This weird journey I’ve gone on, where I’ve studied other beliefs and committed unthinkable ridiculousness and spent more time inebriated than is probably advisable is in no way regretted. I think it’s been necessary to understand. And you’ve helped me do that.

The problem with Before is that I was admittedly a judgmental little twat. I was a compassionate judgmental little twat, but I had never done anything of interest whatsoever, so it was very easy to say, “Oh, well, no decent person would ever…” Well, guess what? I’m a decent person & I’ve done quite a bit of that. I’ve been known to be quite fond of that. So lemme tell ya something. The improvement of Now over Before is that Now? I’ve been tested. This shit has been on the road. This crap has been in the shop, even.

This is a stupid thing to quote, but Booth said to Bones this season, “You have to be a little bad to get to good,” or words to that effect. I don’t know; is that what I’ve been doing? Am I ready for good now? Do I deserve good now?

I can haz nice now?

I am entering a new chapter in my life which yall know I can’t quite discuss at this time. Whatever is happening, it’s happening quickly, it’s happening with great force, it’s being almost handed to me, and it’s happening with all the people I have loved over the years and new people I adore at my side. I’ve reconnected with people I cherish, met up with people who are delightful and kind, & made connections with folks who are truly brilliant in heart & mind. @TRUE has been talking about the coming uberchange, the propocalypse where a tidal wave of awesome is going to sweep us all up, and I’m feeling it. The tide is receding. Right now, all I see is some kelp and there’s a floppy ass fish over there, looking wheezy, but it’s going to get swirly and crazy in a good and fantastic way. There’s glimmery, sparkly shit on the horizon, barreling toward us.

You are ALL my friends. Agree with me or not, think I’m a dipshit or not, are fully informed about what’s going on with me or not, I love you. You have brought me to the water’s edge, in your own way, on some part of this journey, and here we will find together a big ass boat. I will take you, my friends, on the boat, and…oh my God, I sound like John McCain.

I said “My FRIENDS!” See, even *I* thought that was creepy during the campaign, and I gave the man my money!

Ok, so “Ooh shiny!” distracted KJ isn’t going away any time soon.

So anyhow…uh, boat. Yes, we will get on the motherblankin’ boat while everyone else is stuck at Kinkos straight flippin’ copies. This boat will have a water slide, minigolf, an all you can eat sushi bar, a roller derby, an ice skating rink, a bowling alley, a shooting range, a coconut milk ice cream bar, a vegan deli, a fully stocked music room, and a kitten room. That should take care of all of your needs. It certainly takes care of all of mine. Oh and shopping! Can’t forget @Maeko! OH GOD and a law library! Can’t forget @ktabin. The law library will of course have a cigar lounge.

Lots of you don’t “get” Twitter, & that’s fine, but this is what Twitter is supposed to be used for…ok, maybe not. But this is the best use I’ve gotten out of it since the “fake Chuck spoilers” night of hilarity:

Lots of other people use Twitter to say they are eating a sandwich or that they have a crush on the President or to speculate that Tiger Woods’ wife hit him with a golf club because he is having an affair with the President. Those are silly uses for Twitter. The best use for Twitter is the dissemination of true information, plugging your bullshit, & and most of all, finding quick wits & encouraging them to talk. That’s the best part of all.

I’ve made some great friends on Twitter, and I snuzzles you all. Snuzzles.

If you’re not an X-Files fan…wtf are you reading my blog for? Get lost, you fricken’ heathen!

Er…wait, no, I promised I was going to stop starting my posts by alienating 90% of my readers. So…yah.

Eh hem. I shall start over.

If you’re not an X-Files fan, you don’t “get” the title, so I shall explain. Mulder, the FBI agent played by David Duchovny (God, I feel like I’m talking to an immigrant who lived under a 40 ton slab of rubble for the past 20 years) believed in space aliens for reasons that would spoil the whole series for you, so Netflix it. He believed in “little green men”, & he had a now infamous poster in his office that said “I want to believe.”

You want to believe, sweet & scrummy reader, in big green climate crisis, as is evidenced by the wigfest occuring online at the moment regarding what I really enjoy calling Climatequiddick. In case you’ve been living under a 40 ton slab of rubble for the past couple of weeks, some scaliwag hacked into a big central database thingy full of cooked climate books & interesting back-&-forths between climate scientists. What’s now generally believed by everybody who’s even had a passing glance at these puppies is that a lot of what has been sold to us as pressing & tragic is actually very much a numbers game & attempt to package a concept in such a way as to inspire ardor, fear, & acceptance of massive government encroachment on kinda like…everything.

But you want to believe! My friends & the bloggers I follow who dare post the links to the scandalous documents get lambasted. It is very reminscent, to my mind, of the Spanish Inquisition. People who dare question the validity of anthropomorphic climate warming science are, without any evidence, but lots of invectives, slammed in the manner of “Heretic! Heretic! Confess!” It’s kinda religious, peeps. Just a little bit. Kinda a lotta bit, actually.

*I’m so tempted to type “aksh” but that’s SO valley.*

Anyhow. Here’s my thing. It’s clear we’ve done things to our environment, much as a beaver gnaws away a ton of trees & dumps it in a river & kind of messes everything up for the fish below. Unless you are that tribe from The Simpsons, the beaver is not your enemy. However, you hate us. We made plastic & cars & we plow down rain forests. Yeah, we’ve been kind of lackadaisical with God’s green Earth & that was a bit silly & pretty jerkypants. We obviously need to do some replanting & we certainly need to stop tossing things out the car window. That’s just ick.

However, there is a good chance that we are not doing much of anything to the temperature, and then we get evidence that temperature decline is being actively concealed. You would think people would want to look into that for their own selves, but they don’t. Instead, they kinda want to freak. Nowhere is this more apparent than on Twitter right now, because Adam Baldwin is on Twitter. I follow him, as do over 9,500 other people, many of whom I also follow. Since people are only just starting to sort out that he’s a little on the conservative side (heh heh), many superlefties are still following him, & I get to see their comments to him. Rather than post counter arguments & counter studies, they just…yell. Or make condescending sad face remarks. This is something I’ve noticed liberals do when they get butt hurt period, actually, but that’s beside the point.

What strikes me over & over is the ‘religious’ fervour of the mockery & derisiveness. This is the same fervour, remember, that atheists also reserve for those of us who believe in God (or any higher being). Oh yeah, if an atheist ever gets in your face stating that you are wrong for believing in God because that makes you prone to proseletyzing, you make sure you laugh good & long, ok?

“I just had a thought. Don’t laugh; it’s not nice. Ok, a little is understandable.

So we’re getting all secular & it makes it easier to feel smart & sciency & progressive, right? But we have this big gaping hole in our mealy little souls & we want to fill it, but it’s got to be filled with smart & sciency facts, right? So…is that why AGW is the new religion? The responses you’ve gotten on Twitter from some are very “A witch! Burn him!” so I’m kinda thinking religion, as you’ve put forth before with the Crichton videos.

But we can’t just take up any old religion, no. The religion has to be real. We have to see it. There must be empirical, sensible evidence (kinda). We can see smog. We can note the dearth of rain forest (as compared to before). We tut tut every time we see a plastic shopping bag go floating across the highway. These are all modern day anti-miracles, & they are proof that we’ve done something awfully wrong to the Lord Our God, who is…a giant thing we live on & will kill us all if we don’t treat it right. This is all very Old Testament, secular smartipantses!

And there will even be a *FLOOD* if we don’t repent!

I have more wild analogies, but I’ll go take them to my blog. No sense cluttering up yours.”

So. More wild analogies.

In the beginning, God created the Heaven & the Earth. They were good. They were pristine. Utterly loaded with bugs, so not pristine in a way any of us really likes. But that’s what nature is, loaded with bugs (read PJ O’Roarke’s Holidays in Hell). Then we came, took from the forbidden apple tree, processed the apples with high fructose corn syrup, plowed half the garden to build a factory, & mass produced Fruity Apple Like Product. We got fat, developed diabetes, and then God smote us with vascular disease.

We really want God to love us again. We will do anything to make God love us again. And God had a prophet called Al. He came with an Oscar winning film, even! And although things said in that film & also said by him subsequently turned out to be iffy & sometimes downright crazy talk (the Earth’s core is NOT millions of degrees), we are totally into this prophet. He’s offering us a way, many ways to make God happy, stop the flood. The government will even foist ways to make God happy upon us, so we don’t even have to think about it. YAYZ!

You know what?

Just don’t be stupid. Really. I mean, how hard is that? Don’t live like a jerk.

That’s how you make God, whatever your God is, happy. You don’t need the government telling you how to make God happy. You do your own thang, child. The market is currently catering to your religion, so go for it! Invest in your future. Your beliefs are trendy, and therefore, you can worship fashionably, stimulate the economy, and be a big fat selfish American at the same time without having to let on that you really enjoy it. Because a religion through which you can buy salvation really is about ease & comfort & not a whole heck of a lot of sacrifice.